Session 4.4
Fostering Knowledge Integration through Individual Competencies
Olga Skrebec, Marcel Hunecke
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund, Germany
One central goal of inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) research is the education of Inter- and Transdisciplinarians. In our recent study, we focused on a central challenge of ITD processes and raised the question: Which individual competencies facilitate the process of Knowledge Integration and therefore contribute to successful ITD work?
Knowledge integration is the process of combining knowledge from different scientific disciplines as well as real-world expertise in order to extend knowledge about an existing problem or to generate new knowledge.
Previous work address the question of the individual characteristics of ITD experts. Guimarães and colleagues (2019) present a review of motivation, attitudes, and competencies of ITD researchers and were able to confirm many of the postulated characteristics based on empirical results. Furthermore Brandstädter and colleagues (2018) found that interdisciplinary competencies are positively related to individual experience in interdisciplinary collaboration as well as the perceived interdisciplinarity of one' s own projects. Claus and Wiese (2019) additionally showed a positive relationship between interdisciplinary competencies and interest in interdisciplinary work.
Based on these results, our goal was to expand the existing body of knowledge on competence research in the ITD context. In particular, we focused on the question which competencies have a positive impact on knowledge integration.
Perspective Taking, Reflexivity, Analogical Reasoning and Tolerance of Ambiguity and Uncertainty, were investigated as core competencies to foster Knowledge Integration.
Furthermore, we investigated the postulated relationships in the scientific as well as in the economic context and assumed that individual competencies predict Knowledge Integration in different levels of expertise.
To test our hypotheses, 421 participants from the working contexts of science (N = 152) and economy (N = 104) as well as students (N = 165) answered questionnaires on Knowledge Integration and competencies of Knowledge Integration in an online survey. Further questions were related to demographic data, as well as experience and expertise in ITD work.
The main result showed that all postulated competencies were positively related to Knowledge Integration.
Moreover, Perspective Taking showed the strongest effect on Knowledge Integration and mediated the relationships between the other competencies and Knowledge Integration.
Further results revealed that students as well as experts benefit from the education of individual competencies in ITD work and that the postulated competencies predict higher levels of knowledge integration in both economic and scientific contexts.
One way of applying the results in practice is to incorporate the competencies Perspective Taking, Reflexivity, Analogical Reasoning and Tolerance of Ambiguity and Uncertainty into educational units, trainings or coaching sessions of ITD education.
However, further studies using different methodologies are needed to investigate the interactions of the postulated competencies with knowledge integration. Our study involved a quantitative survey. Experimental studies are planned in the future to investigate the causal effect of competencies on knowledge integration. Yet qualitative methods should also be employed to understand how and which facets of competencies are socialized in different work contexts.
Literature
Brandstädter, S., Schleiting, Y., & Sonntag, K. (2018). Interdisziplinäre Kompetenz in der Wirtschaft [Interdisciplinary competence in business]. Zeitschrift Für Arbeitswissenschaft [Journal of Industrial Science], 72(1), 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41449-017-0080-9
Claus, A. M., & Wiese, B. S. (2019). Development and test of a model of interdisciplinary competencies. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 28(2), 191–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1567491
Guimarães, M. H., Pohl, C., Bina, O., & Varanda, M. (2019). Who is doing inter- and transdisciplinary research, and why? An empirical study of motivations, attitudes, skills, and behaviours. Futures, 112, 102441, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102441
Inselkita Spiekeroog - Energy efficient design of an environmental kindergarden for early childhood education on the island Spiekeroog – a collaborative- transdisciplinary higher education teaching project
Anja Willmann 1 & 3, Lena S. Kaiser 2, Roland Pesch 1, Sebastian Hollermann 1
1 Jade Hochschule, Germany; 2 Hochschule Emden-Leer, Germany; 3 Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
This paper describes a collaborative- transdisciplinary higher education teaching project organised by Jade University of Applied Sciences and University of Applied Sciences Emden/ Leer in Lower Saxony, Germany interconnecting bachelor and master students of the following fields: a) early childhood pedagogy, b) geoinformation science, c) architecture and d) civil engineering. The cross-disciplinary task of a kindergarden design proposal offers a comprehensive and practical example for all four participating professional disciplines addressing practise-based learning. The task requires professional knowledge input and a specific role of each individual discipline: Students of early childhood pedagogy provide the pedagogical concept by taking the role of a client. Geoinformation science students provide geodata on ecology, demography, soil and climate which are taken into account by architectural students to translate the requirements into a design proposal. The civil engineers act as consultants on climate-sensitive construction and construction site logistics regarding the specific environment of an island. The project enables students to experience working in a transdisciplinary environment. Of particular interest are the challenges of integrating multiple perspectives based on expert knowledge in a design process task of a learning environment focussing on resource-efficient and climate-sensitive criteria. The project focusses on the following competences and learning outcomes: communication, cooperation and coordination, development of a scientifically reflecting habitus, flexibility and openness to unknown and foreign methodologies. Furthermore, learning in a protected and closed academic environment by realistic case challenges is a process that allows students to foster creative exploration, realistic simulations and feasible experiments. Due to the corona pandemic the module was conducted completely online, which surprisingly enhanced the cross-disciplinary group work. Evolving from content-based teaching to learning by knowledge consolidation and further development of individual skills enabled the lecturers to emphasize on independent, creative and responsible teaching to provoke intrinsic motivation and positive learning outcomes. This teaching module was conducted for the first time during the summer semester 2020 and will be offered frequently.
